Failure

[Stroam]

How many ways can you currently fail in VS? You can fail to notice a hole you just stepped into. You can fail to keep yourself alive when battling monsters. You can fail to retrieve your stuff before it despawns. You can fail to hit a vein on your first mine shaft.

No risk, no reward. Failure is an important part of life and video games. Someone who survives failure has gained irreplaceable knowledge and unstoppable perseverance born from overcoming hardship. Too much of today's thinking we are taught from a young age that failing is bad and something to fear. While that can be true in real life where failure can lead to serious harm or injury, in video games failure should be embraced and shielding players from failure in video games is teaching them to never step out of their comfort zone which is a shame because failure in video games is only temporary. Furthermore risk fundamentally changes how a player plays a game. Right now when a player dies to a wolf they have learned wolves are dangerous and usually bring at least two blocks and a weapon with reach.

While VS does allow you to fail in combat and searching for ore, it actively shields the player from crafting mistakes. If you put an incorrect pattern in a crafting grid it doesn't fail to produce anything, it prevents you from crafting. If it will not turn into a viable material it simply doesn't allow it to happen. Same with copper alloys. With building and digging, since there is no collapse mechanics there is also no chance of failure. Same with swimming and drowning. Without failure, success isn't something to celebrate, it's a guarantee, an eventuality.

What VS needs is calculated risks. Calculated risks involve trade offs. Do I take the armor in case I run into baddies or do I skip it in favor of moving quickly? Do I take my bags with me and risk losing them or do I leave them behind, locate the objective, and make the path safer so I don't lose them? Awhile back was discussing smelting. One view point was making the mechanics more complex so that they could get maximum benefit out of the system while retaining the zero chance of failure? I think that's a mistake and that if the system is going to be changed there should be a chance of failure but that the product should be fixable or subpar. I won't go into the crafting grid because it's supposedly temporary, although mods are already heavily utilizing it so it's probably going to stick around a lot longer than anticipated if replacements don't start coming out.

[redram]

Also impossible to fail at flint knapping (which did not used to be the case)